but between all the social media networks' notifications,

there's a sense that they're starting

to take over our lives.

Now I have an iPhone 6 and it's a pretty good phone.

The problem is I spend a lot of time on it

scrolling through Twitter, Instagram and whatever else.

So to help me deal with my iPhone addiction,

I decided to play around with some more minimalist phones.

That includes the Unihertz Jelly,

the Nokia 3310, the Punkt MP 01, and The Light Phone.

And I'm gonna head to Brooklyn's Prospect Park to see

how disconnected I can get.

(upbeat, modern music)

This is the Jelly, a tiny little Android smartphone.

Unihertz, the creators, call it impossibly small,

amazingly cute, and totally functional.

Only two of those things are true,

but I'm kinda getting ahead of myself.

First thing you'll notice about the Jelly

is just how small it is.

At three and a half inches in length, it fits into

the palm of my hand, costs $125, runs on Android 7,

has a 1.1 gigahertz processor, and has front and rear-facing

cameras that are eight and two megapixels,

which isn't that great.

The phone runs on 4G network and has Dual SIM cards.

Now, because of the thickness, a lot of people thought

it had a slide-out keyboard, which it doesn't.

But it does have a two and a half inch touchscreen

that's fully functional.

Back to those two truths and a lie.

The Jelly is impossibly small and amazingly cute,

and there's just something cool about having the full

functionality of a smartphone in such a small package.

Scrolling through an Instagram Live video on such

a tiny screen is just kind of fun.

And if you wanna disconnect,

there's a purpose for the smallness.

With the screen so small it adds a level of friction

that we're not typically used to, so I found myself

reading less and actually just pulling

my phone out less entirely.

But the Jelly's small size actually

threatens its functionality.

Using the Jelly's thimble-sized keyboard

was almost impossible and I kept making tons of mistakes.

In the end, I started texting less because I wanted

to make less typos.

The Jelly's other big drawback is battery life.

Downloading just a few apps made my phone hot,

and I lost almost 20% of my battery.

At 83% it told me I only had four hours of life left,

which meant that I had to carry around

this huge battery pack all day long

just to make it through the day.

And if you wanna use the phone less,

maybe that's not such a bad thing.

But if you really wanna disconnect, you might wanna

ditch your smartphone for a feature phone.

Nokia 3310 is one of the most iconic and popular phones

of all time, and in 2017, the company rereleased it

as part of its nostalgia-driven marketing push.

Now, the new phone benefits from a larger color screen

and a more bubbly design than its brick-like predecessor.

It has a two megapixel camera in the back

and runs on Nokia's proprietary OS.

It comes with a classic 2002 era skeleton crew of apps

like a calculator, a calendar, and obviously Snake.

Unlike the Jelly, it has a pretty good battery life,

about six and a half hours of talk time,

and 650 hours of standby time.

And it's cheap. You can get one for $60.

You'll notice the home screen has a couple of new additions

including a Facebook and Twitter button,

but open them up and you get stuck

in Nokia's weird Web client that you have to navigate

with a clunky directional pad.

It's so hard to use that eventually I just gave up,

and maybe if you're trying to disconnect

that's not really a problem.

Moving over to the Nokia also comes with another big shift

and that's going from a full keyboard to T9.

And if you're like me, you haven't used T9 in awhile,

it takes some getting used to.

It can definitely be clunky,

but if you're trying to text less, it works.

T9ing is too slow to text-bomb, and eventually,

you might just stop texting altogether.

If you really wanna get intentional about minimalist phones,

you might wanna check out Punkt MP 01 phone.

Punkt means 'period' or 'stop' in German,

and it's a Swiss company that makes minimalist products.

A lot of times when people see the MP 01 for the first time,

they think it looks like a calculator,

but I kind of actually like the design.

It comes in three colors: brown, black, and white.

It's four and a half inches tall, it has

Gorilla Glass and a fiberglass reinforced body,

so it feels sturdy in the hand.

Navigating the phone is actually pretty easy,

'cause it only does two things and it has buttons

to navigate towards them, and that's texting and calling.

The only hitch is that it costs $230, which is a lot

for a phone that only does two things.

And of those two things, it doesn't do one of them

very well, and that's texting.

So most phones when you text, they create a thread,

but the MP 01 actually breaks it up like email

into an inbox, sent, draft, et cetera.

Which is really confusing and kind of a pain in the ass.

And the phone did a pretty bad job of

capitalizing my sentences when I text,

which is really pretty basic stuff.

It kind of feels like the perfect phone for somebody

who can afford to hire someone else to take care

of the rest of their lives.

Oh, and did I mention that it only runs on a 2G network?

And T-Mobile is one of the few carriers that

still supports 2G in the U.S.?

And they're gonna phase it out by 2020.

All of which makes MP 01's claim that

the Punkt is a timeless device feel kinda empty.

If there's one phone that really represents the

minimalist phone movement, it's The Light Phone,

a business card sized device that you can either

tether to your phone of use independently.

It costs $150 and it literally only does one thing

and that's make phone calls.

New phones try to dazzle you with big, bright displays

and bezel-less design, but not The Light Phone.

The Light Phone really doesn't want any of your attention.

It's a beautiful device and a lot of people I showed it to

didn't even believe it worked,

but it works exactly as advertised.

And there was something freeing knowing that I could

leave the house just with this and reach somebody

if I really needed to.

At least, I hope I could, because if I'm being honest,

people don't really pick up their phones anymore.

I mean, I make one phone call a day maybe,

but I'm texting all the time,

either through Messenger or Slack or Twitter,

and that makes The Light Phone feel like

an experiment more than a viable product,

an effort to gauge whether people would really be interested

in such a minimal device.

And apparently they are.

In 2018, the company announced Light Phone II,

a 4G version that would have E-ink display, a full keyboard,

and possibly even some features like maps and music.

But loading smartphone features onto such a minimal device

is probably gonna have problems of its own.

I spent a lot of time with these phones

over the last couple weeks, and what I've realized is that,

I don't really want a phone that limits my communication

or one that makes me make more phone calls.

In 2018, a lot of our communication happens over text,

and I don't really think that's such a bad thing.

What I don't really need is all the social media networks,

all the notifications, the short battery life,

and the bezel-less screen.

That's what kinda makes phones overwhelming,

not a text from my mom or a friend.

What I really want is a smartphone functionality

stripped of all the gizmos.

Unfortunately, a lot of these minimalist phones

threw out the texting baby with the social media bathwater.

So until they figure that out, I'm just gonna

delete my social media apps and keep my iPhone.

Fox.com has a video that explains how addictive

smartphones could be.

Click here to watch it and find out how necessary

a minimalist phone could be for you.